Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  The essence of it all was that the entire village of Lychcombe was in the process of being bought up. Everything in and around it—every house, every farm, every shop, every building—was either sold already, being sold, or under offer.

  “It’s been going on for a couple of years now,” Jess explained. “Most of the villagers wouldn’t have anything to do with it at first. A lot of them have lived here all their lives—their families are here, their roots, their history. This is their home. They don’t want to live anywhere else. But as the offers kept coming in, and kept getting bigger and bigger, some of them started changing their minds.” She shrugged. “You can’t blame them. I mean, it was big money, silly money, much more than the properties were worth, and after a while they just couldn’t resist it. After that, everything started to snowball. The ones who didn’t want to sell began to realize there wasn’t any point in staying because there wasn’t going to be anything left to stay for—no shops, no pub, no school, no work…no Lychcombe.” She paused, looking back down the hill in the direction of the village. “It’s pretty much all gone now,” she said. “There’s still a few left who haven’t given in, but they won’t last long.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would anyone want to buy a whole village? Especially this one. I mean, there’s nothing here, is there?”

  “Not yet, but there soon will be.” She looked at me. “Have you heard of a place called Dunstone Castle?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a luxury hotel on the other side of the moor, about ten or twelve miles from here. It used to be a castle…well, it still is a castle, I suppose. It was bought up a couple of years ago and completely rebuilt—the buildings, the land, everything. Now it’s all golf courses and swimming pools and conference rooms…there’s even a private heliport. People come from all over the world to stay there.”

  “Big money,” I muttered.

  “Exactly—which is why they want to build another one here.”

  “Here?”

  She nodded. “Apparently, this one’s going to be even bigger than Dunstone. A brand-new custom-built hotel, restaurants, golf courses, horse-riding, shooting, fishing…no expense spared.”

  “No locals to bother you, either.”

  “Just the peace and tranquillity of the moor…”

  “Your own private haven.”

  Jess smiled at me. “It’ll make a fortune.”

  “Who for?”

  She shook her head. “No one knows. Whoever’s behind it, they don’t get involved at this level. All the property deals are done through a third party. They appoint someone to run things, and the person who runs things appoints someone else to appoint someone else local to do all the dirty work.”

  “What kind of dirty work?”

  “Buying people out, basically. Persuading them to sell.”

  “Persuading?”

  She shrugged. “Not everyone knows what’s good for them.”

  I was beginning to understand things now. I was beginning to see the missing pieces—the layers, the shades…the things that make up what’s supposed to be there.

  “Who’s the persuader?” I said.

  Jess looked at me. “His name’s Henry Quentin. You probably saw him in the Bridge the other night.”

  “The man with the beard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he live in the village?”

  She nodded. “In the big stone house at the end of the High Street. I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s making a lot of money out of this. He gets a fee from the hotel people, plus a commission on everything he buys, and a big bonus payment when the whole deal’s done. I’ve heard he’s got a few things going on for himself, too—things the hotel people don’t know about.” She looked at me again. “That’s why no one wants you around, poking your nose in. Henry’s not the only one making money out of this—he’s got half the village in his pocket. And if they think you’re stirring things up too much…well, they’re not going to like it.”

  She uncapped the water bottle and took another drink. I watched her, wondering why she was telling me all this. Was she simply giving me a friendly warning, just letting me know how things were? Or was there something else, something she hadn’t told me yet?

  I guessed I’d just have to wait and see.

  The sun was directly above us now, glaring down with a pale white heat that shimmered in the air like an unseen mist. In the timeless silence I could feel Rachel’s breath on the wind. She wasn’t far away now. I could feel her presence, her pain, her death. She was with me. She’d been with me all along—with me, with Jess, with the dogs—in the forest, on the hill…she’d been with us all the way. But now she was right here, right now, in this time.

  Jess stood up and put the bottle of water in her pocket. “Ready?” she said, looking down at me.

  I got to my feet and we continued on up the hill.

  “She was found just there,” Jess said quietly. “Under the thorn tree.”

  We were standing beside an ancient stone circle at the end of a short grassy track near the top of the hill. The old granite stones were half-buried in the ground, spaced about a meter apart, forming a ragged ring about four meters across. Grass was growing inside the circle—lush and thick and green—but outside the ring there was nothing but dry grass and rock. I didn’t understand it—the geography, the history, the shape of the land—but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to understand it.

  This was the place.

  The ring of stones, the stunted thorn tree, the dying wind…

  This was where it had happened.

  It should have looked different in the daylight. Without the storming rain, without the night, without the purple-black light that rolled the sky to the ground…it should have been harder to believe—but it wasn’t. It was midnight in the middle of the day, and I could see Rachel lying there naked and dead in the dark.

  I could see it all too clearly.

  I could feel her death.

  Jess’s dogs could feel something, too. They were sitting off to one side of the circle, both of them whining quietly. Their hackles were up, their ears were flattened against their heads, and their backs were arched in fear. I didn’t know if it was Rachel’s death they could sense, or if there was something else within the stone circle that frightened them, something that only they could feel—an aura, a power, an unknown force. I didn’t know if I believed in such things, but as I gazed around at the lichened rocks and the wind-sculpted thorn tree in front of me, I knew what I could feel: I could feel Rachel dying, the Dead Man breathing, the rain running red with blood.

  And I believed in that.

  I could see the Dead Man in the shadows of the thorn tree. He was dark and sharp and dirty…his face a broken black knife. His hands were scarred. He was bleeding, scratched, bitten. Yellow-eyed. He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.

  I turned around and looked at Jess. She was standing a few paces behind me. The dogs were lying down beside her now, their heads held low to the ground.

  “Who is he?” I asked her.

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  Her eyes flickered, and for a moment I thought she was going to lie to me again, but when she spoke her voice was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was going to tell you…I just didn’t know if I ought to or not. I mean, there’s no proof or anything…it’s all just rumors, really—”

  “Tell me his name,” I said quietly.

  She looked at me. “Selden. His name’s John Selden.”

  “Selden?”

  She nodded.

  I brought the Dead Man into my mind and tried putting the name to his broken face—Selden, Selden, John Selden…? The words fit. The name became him—he was John Selden.

  “Who is he?” I asked Jess. “What does he do?”

  She shook her head. “He’s nothing…he doesn’t do anything. He just hangs around on his own most of the time—skulking around in the wood
s, or on the moor…” A look of disgust crossed her face. “He’s a creepy little shit. I caught him watching me once. I was out walking the dogs and they started barking up a tree, and when I looked up I saw Selden sitting in the branches with a dirty little grin on his face…” She looked at me. “He hasn’t been seen since Rachel was killed. The police have been looking for him, asking questions, searching his room—”

  “How would he have gotten here?” I asked her. “How would he have gotten Rachel up here?”

  “The village road’s just down there,” Jess said, pointing down to the right of the hill. “See? Behind that little copse.”

  There was a lay-by at the side of the road, a little gateway through to the copse, a pathway up the hill…it wasn’t far. Less than a hundred meters. It wasn’t too far to carry a body. I gazed down the slope, imagining the Dead Man toiling his way up the hill, clambering over the rocks, carrying my sister’s body through the storming rain…

  Why?

  Why did he do it?

  Why did he kill Rachel?

  Why did he bring her up here?

  Why?

  I could feel my head spinning with questions now. Why had no one mentioned John Selden before? Why was Jess telling me about him now? Who was he? Where did he come from? Who’d killed him? And why? And what had they done with his body…?

  And then suddenly I was feeling something else—a familiar race of blood in my heart. It was the same sudden fear I’d felt on the night Rachel died, only this time it was coming from Jess. I looked over at her. She was staring up ahead, beyond the ring of stones, where three slouching figures were coming down the hill toward us. They were walking side by side. The two on the outside were carrying shotguns; the one in the middle was Red.

  Nine

  Istudied the three men as they approached the circle of stones. Red hadn’t changed one bit—he was still wearing his grubby red suit, still smiling his sharp-toothed smile, still fixing me with his wrong-looking eyes. With his hands in his pockets and his suit collar turned up, he looked like some kind of weird rural gangster. The other two were walking vegetables. The one on Red’s right was a Potato Man—fat head, seedy eyes, flaky brown skin—while the one on his left looked like a bean sprout on legs. Tall and skinny, with a bulbous head and horseradish fingers and eyes that could make an onion cry. Potato Man was wearing an army jacket and boots; the skinny one was in a sleeveless nylon jacket and a baseball cap. They both had their shotguns slung over their shoulders, and neither of them was smiling.

  As they reached the edge of the stone circle, I felt Jess move up beside me. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to—I was with her now, sharing her senses, seeing the three men through her eyes. She recognized Red and Potato Man, but she hadn’t seen Skinny before. She knew what he was, though. She’d seen the likes of him a thousand times before—we both had. He was a fear-sucker, the same as the other two. And they were all getting ready to feed. We could see their mouths drooling at the scent of our fright, and there was nothing we could do to hide it. We were scared—period. But we could still function. We could see the dull glint of their double-barreled shotguns. We could see the dead rabbit stuffed into Potato Man’s pocket. We could see the finger of rabbit’s blood smeared on his face.

  We both thought they might stop at the edge of the stone circle, but they didn’t. They were senseless—unaware of unseen things. They just walked straight across the circle without so much as a thought—under the thorn tree, over the ghost of Rachel’s body, through the shifting shadows of the Dead Man, and right up into our faces.

  “Hey,” said Red, flicking a smile at me. “How’s your luck?”

  It was the kind of question that fear-suckers use to start a fight—What are you looking at? What’s your problem?—and we both knew it was pointless trying to answer it. Red knew it, too. I could tell by his laughing eyes, by his nodding head and his twitching shoulders. I could tell by the way he grinned and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “All right?” he said.

  My mind flashed back to the day before. All right? he’d said to me then, and then I’d just kept my mouth shut and waited for Cole to do his stuff. But now I was on my own. With Jess.

  Red smiled at me. “Where’s Jackie Chan?”

  “Who?”

  He punched the air, making me flinch, but when he grinned again and grabbed his throat and groaned, I realized he was reminding me of what Cole had done to Big Davy.

  “Must be nice having a big brother like that,” he said, taking his hands from his throat and grinning again. “I wish I’d had a brother to keep all the nasty big boys away.” He made a show of gazing around the stone circle, then he turned back to me. “Looks like you’re on your own today, though.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “No?” He looked around again, staring through Jess as if she wasn’t there. “I don’t see anyone else,” he said, turning to the Potato Man. “You see anyone else, Nate?”

  “I don’t see shit,” Potato Man grunted.

  Red turned back to me. “You must be seeing ghosts, boy. There’s plenty up here—pixies and shit, ghouls and ghosties…” He raised his hands, widening his eyes and moaning, like a child playing at ghosts. Then he dropped his hands and winked at me. “Oh, yeah—we always got plenty of dead stuff.”

  I was thinking of Cole now. Wishing he was here, wishing I was him, wishing I could take this stuff without my heart jumping up and down like a frog. I wished I had some control over the things inside me—the mechanisms, the signals, the reactions—but I knew I was wasting my time.

  “What you doing up here, anyway?” Red said to me. “This is forestry land. It’s private. You’re trespassing.”

  “You’re breaking the law,” added Nate, the Potato Man. His voice was so lazy and his accent so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. I looked at him. His lips were loose and his tongue was too fat for his mouth.

  “What?” I said.

  “Whut?” he echoed.

  Jess suddenly let out a sigh—a loud and exaggerated yawn of boredom—and all at once everything switched to her. Nate and Skinny just swiveled their heads and stared at her, but Red made a big show of it—widening his eyes and stepping back in mock surprise as if Jess had suddenly appeared from nowhere.

  “Shit,” he said with a grin, clamping his hand to his chest, “where d’you come from? You nearly gave me a heart attack, man. How d’you do that?”

  Jess said nothing, just stared at him with a slight shake of her head.

  Red leaned forward and cupped a hand to his ear. “Say what? Come on, speak to me. Tell me how you do it. Come on, don’t be shy—I won’t bite.”

  When Jess still didn’t answer him, he grinned again and spoke to her in a stupidly simple voice. “You…speakee…English? No? You…pikey…yes?”

  Jess’s eyes showed nothing.

  Red leaned back and spoke to Potato Man. “You know any pikey words, Nate?”

  “Tarmac,” he grunted, “caravan…not guilty…”

  “Hedgehog,” added Skinny.

  Red laughed. “Hedgehog?”

  “They eats ’em.”

  “They eats anything,” Nate said.

  “You wish…”

  They all laughed again. It was the same old sound—the sound of the grown-up playground—and I could tell that Jess wasn’t bothered about it. She knew as well as I did that, in itself, it was nothing. It was just a warmup, a bit of sparring, a blast of hot air to get things going. When the laughing stopped—that was the time to start worrying.

  I glanced at Jess and saw that she was standing with her hands held down at her sides, the palms facing backward, keeping her two dogs behind her. They were sitting motionless, their jaws set tight and their eyes fixed on Red and his boys.

  Red said to Nate, “Give her the rabbit.”

  “What?”

  “The rabbit…give her your rabbit.”

  “What for?”


  Red ignored him, turning to Jess. “You want a rabbit? A nice little bunny?” He started making eating motions, smacking his lips and rubbing his belly. “Yum yum, very nice…you like?” He grinned his grin. “You likee fresh meat? Nice and tasty—”

  “Hey, shit-head,” Jess said quietly. “Let’s just get it done, OK?”

  Red leaned back, doing his mock-surprise thing again. “I’m sorry? Did you say something?”

  “Look,” she said patiently, “we’ve all got better things to do than stand around here listening to you all day, so why don’t we just cut the crap and get on with it. We’ve done the funny gypsy stuff and the dirty little jokes…what else do you want to do? You want to scare the kid some more? Impress your friends? You want to say some naughty words?”

  Nate and Skinny were smirking at each other now, but Red didn’t think it was funny. His smile had thinned to a white-lipped scar.

  “Come on,” Jess taunted him, “say something funny. Insult me. Let’s have some more of your gypsy stuff.” She snapped her fingers. “I know, how about the interbreeding thing? That’s always a good one—incest and race. Two insults for the price of one.”

  Red’s staring face had drained to a pale white mask, the whiteness stained with angry red blotches. His skin was so tight that when he spoke, his lips barely moved. “Race?” he hissed at Jess. “Race? You’re not a race, you’re just a waste of blood.”

  “That’s more like it,” Jess said, clapping her hands. “That’s excellent. What else have you got?”

  I could feel the bad stuff coming now, and I guessed that was Jess’s intention—get it on, get it over, get it done. Normally, I might not have minded—but this wasn’t normal. This was a twitchy red lunatic and two big vegetables with double-barreled shotguns.

  I looked around. Red was wired up—his head nodding, his elbows twitching, his face a mess of pale-skinned tics—and the other two were beginning to get the message. Their smirks had gone and they’d put their dead faces on. Their eyes were jumpy and white. Nate had taken the dead rabbit from his pocket and was holding it by its ears, swinging it gently against his leg, and Skinny was leering at Jess and scratching his crotch.